Department of Economics, University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa.
National Treasury of the Republic of South Africa, Pretoria, South Africa.
Front Public Health. 2021 Apr 29;9:638481. doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2021.638481. eCollection 2021.
The scale of impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on society and the economy globally provides a strong incentive to thoroughly analyze the efficiency of healthcare systems in dealing with the current pandemic and to obtain lessons to prepare healthcare systems to be better prepared for future pandemics. In the absence of a proven vaccine or cure, non-pharmaceutical interventions including social distancing, testing and contact tracing, isolation, and wearing of masks are essential in the fight against the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic. We use data envelopment analysis and data compiled from Worldometers and The World Bank to analyze how efficient the use of resources were to stabilize the rate of infections and minimize death rates in the top 36 countries that represented 90% of global infections and deaths out of 220 countries as of November 11, 2020. This is the first paper to model the technical efficiency of countries in managing the COVID-19 pandemic by modeling death rates and infection rates as undesirable outputs using the approach developed by You and Yan. We find that the average efficiency of global healthcare systems in managing the pandemic is very low, with only six efficient systems out of a total of 36 under the variable returns to scale assumption. This finding suggests that, holding constant the size of their healthcare systems (because countries cannot alter the size of a healthcare system in the short run), most of the sample countries showed low levels of efficiency during this time of managing the pandemic; instead it is suspected that most countries literally "threw" resources at fighting the pandemic, thereby probably raising inefficiency through wasted resource use.
新冠疫情对全球社会和经济的影响规模，强烈激励我们对医疗体系应对当前疫情的效率进行全面分析，并从中吸取经验教训，为医疗体系应对未来疫情做好更充分的准备。在缺乏有效疫苗和治疗方法的情况下，非药物干预措施，包括社交距离、检测和接触者追踪、隔离和佩戴口罩，对于抗击全球范围内的新冠疫情至关重要。我们运用数据包络分析（Data Envelopment Analysis）和来自世界人口统计（Worldometers）和世界银行（The World Bank）的数据，分析了在截至 2020 年 11 月 11 日全球 220 个国家中，占全球感染和死亡人数 90%的前 36 个国家在稳定感染率和降低死亡率方面资源利用效率的高低。这是第一篇使用由 You 和 Yan 开发的方法，将死亡率和感染率建模为不良产出，以此来模拟各国在应对新冠疫情方面的技术效率的论文。我们发现，在处理新冠疫情期间，全球医疗体系的平均管理效率非常低，在总共有 36 个国家的样本中，仅有 6 个国家的体系在可变规模报酬的假设下是有效的。这一发现表明，在保持医疗体系规模不变（因为各国在短期内无法改变医疗体系的规模）的情况下，大多数样本国家在管理疫情时的效率水平都较低；相反，人们怀疑大多数国家实际上是在“投入”资源来抗击疫情，从而可能通过资源浪费导致效率降低。
